Advantage of technical education

Technical education is the crying need of India. India has had an over-dose of liberal education. Our education is incomplete and without any purpose if we do not receive some sort of technical education besides our liberal education. A just balance between liberal education and technical education needs to be maintained.

Our British masters did not encourage technical education in 0ur country. The result was terrible unemployment. We depended up0n the industrial goods of other countries. Technical education enables student to pick up a skill with which he may make his living, even if he remains unemployed after taking up his graduation.

We need an army of highly technical hands for our multi-purpose river-projects, steel factories, fertilizer industry, locomotive and air-craft manufacture. Even agriculture is being rapidly mechanized by means of tractors and bulldozers.

We need more and more technicians to manufacture tractors in India. We need scientists and technologists with practical knowledge of banking, insurance and business organization which includes salesmanship and advertisement in all their numerous aspects. Technical knowledge is as vast as the sea.

India is predominantly an agricultural country. Our peasants are idle for six months during the year. If they are trained in cottage industries, they can add to their income. Without developing our cottage industries, we cannot solve the grim problem of unemployment. A young man who has received technical education need not knock from office to office for a petty clerical job. He can earn his living by making articles of daily use.

A mere knowledge of Shakespeare, Kalidas or Sanskrit Grammar or Philosophy or Mathematics may adorn a young man's mind but how on earth will it enable him to keep the wolf from the door? Scholars and men of liberal education may starve but a skilled labourer never does.

Gone is the time when manual labour was looked down upon. A manual labourer is now as respectable a member of society as an intellectual luminary. Manual work is as important as any other type of work and technical education is as dignified as liberal education. Technical education makes a man self-reliant and plucky. He begins taking initiative. He becomes more practical.

The safety of the country lies in striking a golden mean between liberal education and technical education.